Glossary

Glossary of Multics acronyms and terms. Entries by Tom Van Vleck ([THVV]) unless noted. Please post additions or corrections to alt.os.multics, or mail them to Tom Van Vleck.

wakeup

See IPC.

wired

[BSG] Today called "page-locked". Said of code or data that is fixed in physical memory, either by virtue of being in unpaged segments (individual segments can either be paged or contiguous in memory), or in segments whose pages are marked as being non-removable. This is done for code and data that must be either be run or referenced at an equal or lower conceptual level than the I/O and page management routines doing the paging, data actually being transferred to and from I/O controllers, or code which must compete with such code for resources and its data. In practice, this means page control, the scheduler, the disk routines, low-level I/O control routines, interrupt handlers and vectors, page tables, and that subset of the PL/I runtime (see pl1_operators_) that is used by any of those aforementioned that are written in PL/I. Except as an experiment, code or data was never wired for performance reasons.

WORDPRO

Marketing package for compose plus Emacs, plus Speedtype, plus a simplified shell. Originally advocated by Bill Silver. Documented in Honeywell manual AZ98.

working directory

The directory used as the implicit prefix of relative path names. See search rules.

working set

The set of pages, at any time, required in core for a program to make reasonable progress without thrashing. Defined by Peter Denning.

write bracket

[BSG] The range of rings which can write a given segment. If the segment's ring brackets are 1, 5, 5, the write bracket is rings 0 to 1. Also sometimes used to refer to that upper inclusive limit itself.